TRENTON — Part of the hotel funds to be voted on at next week’s city council meeting were initially proposed by a surprising source.

Council President Phyllis Holly-Ward, who has been an opponent of continuing to financially support the city-owned Trenton Marriott, suggested at a March budget committee hearing that $200,000 be set aside in reserve for the struggling hotel.

“I’m just saying for us internally, just like our emergency house account,” she said. “As long as we own it we’re going to have that emergency, you got to put it up just like you do your house.”

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At the meeting, Holly-Ward said that the Lafayette Yard Community Development Corporation, which oversees the hotel, wouldn’t even have to know the funds were available, but was told by a member of the business office that it would become public once the budget was passed.

And the hotel board did take note.

LYCDC members plan to appear before council this coming week to seek the $200,000 for a new reservation system for the hotel, because Marriott is taking its system with them when the franchise pulls out of the city’s only hotel on June 14. The LYCDC is also seeking $3 million for transition and renovation costs.

But Holly-Ward said Friday that the $200,000 was not for a new reservation system.

“It was in the hotel to pay bills,” she said. “There are normally bills that continue to trickle in and that’s what the reserve was for.”

Holly-Ward claims LYCDC members “weren’t paying attention.”

“They just assumed ... but they never really looked into what it was for,” she said. “It’s called being proactive and what they’re doing is being reactive.”

Despite her stance that the funds were set aside for paying bills, the council president did vote against a $295,000 cash call geared mostly at paying overdue bills the week before the March budget meeting.

“You got a big picture of all the things that have been going on with the hotel, what it meant to them, how it would affect their business if it closed,” she said. “It was very insightful.”

The 197-room hotel, which opened in 2002, is plagued with approximately $30 million in debt, which includes a $14 million city bond, a combined $9 million in state loans and more than $7.3 million owed in a note to the Trenton Parking Authority.

She said the consensus in the room was that the LYCDC board needs to be reconstituted so it can be better managed.

Holly-Ward used an analogy of injecting money into the hotel like pumping gas into a plane to keep it running.

“Somebody can put me (into the pilot’s seat of) a plane but I’m going to crash,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how much fuel you put into it, because I don’t know how to fly a plane.”

MID Jersey Chamber President Bob Prunetti said the organization is supportive of keeping the hotel afloat. He said chamber members will appear before council Thursday to “let their voices be heard.”

“I don’t know if any of us have the solution about where Trenton gets the money,” he said. “We are trying to express that this hotel is an extremely important anchor for the downtown. If we’re going to expect to have any future economic development downtown, you can’t let the hotel close.”

But the chamber will not be offering up donations for the cause.

“I don’t know that we have any money to offer,” he said. “We don’t have those kinds of revenues.”

He is proposing a long-term solution by creating a joint fund with different organizations, such as government and private sector participants.

“It won’t just be for a hotel, but would work toward economic development, infrastructure-type projects in the city,” he said.